Penelope

by Rebecca Harrington

  “Do you want to play checkers?” asked Glasses.

  Nikil nodded. Apparently he and Glasses were the only ones talking/able to play checkers. Everyone else stayed motionless on the floor, while Glasses and Nikil went to find the checkerboard in a large Tupperware full of other board games.

  “Hi, I’m Penelope,” said Penelope again to the other two. “I’m from Connecticut.”

  “Hi, I’m Jason,” said a remarkably egg-like person with red mottled skin and a mop of flaxen hair. The effort of salutation seemed to exhaust him. He lapsed into silence.

  “Ted,” said the other one. Ted looked a little like Penelope would expect Mark Anthony to look, as he had small curling bangs.

  “Do you live here?” asked Penelope.

  “Indeed,” said Ted. “Jason lives across the hall.”

  “I wonder what across the hall is like,” said Penelope.

  “What?” said Ted.

  “Nothing,” said Penelope.

  Nikil and Glasses came back from the Tupperware. They seemed surprised that Penelope was still there.

  “Hi,” said Penelope. “I’m Penelope. I’m from Connecticut.” Then she remembered her mother’s admonition to be silent. It was too late now. Pretty soon she would be talking about the car seat.

  “You guys are the only people who I have met in the dorm,” she continued.

  “Yeah,” said Glasses. “That’s ’cause everyone else is at the panel.”

  “The panel? What panel?” Penelope asked.

  “Oh, the panel on medical school admissions,” said Nikil.

  “But medical school is like six years away from now,” Penelope said.

  “Yeah, I’m more interested in finance. But I’m waiting for the one on law school. That’s on Thursday,” said Nikil.

  “Me too, man,” said Glasses. They high-fived.

  “I mean, it’s not like this is some blow-off week,” said Nikil, addressing everyone and no one. “This week’s for us to take stock of our futures. We have to take placement exams, we have to meet with our proctors, we have to choose our classes. It’s going to involve a lot of time. I’m planning on having a busy semester.”

  “What are the placement exams?” asked Penelope.

  “Did you read the freshman orientation materials at all?” asked Nikil, aghast. “The placement exam is the test they give this week to place us into the correct required math and English courses.”

  “Oh, those,” said Penelope. “I thought those weren’t a big deal and we couldn’t study for them or anything. When are they?”

  “In a couple of days,” said Glasses. “That’s why we’re staying in tonight. We can relax a little later at the ice cream social. I am going to at least see if I can get into Math 55.”

  They high-fived again. Penelope noticed for the first time that Glasses was wearing a mock turtleneck even though it was approximately 105 degrees outside.

  “I didn’t realize the placement exam was so soon. But I mean, there is nothing you can do to prepare for them. We don’t have to stay in. This is our first night here, in college,” said Penelope.

  No one replied to this, so Penelope started giggling.

  “You know, when I was little …” she started.

  “What are you gonna major in?” asked Ted, as if sensing disaster was ahead.

  “It’s ‘concentrate.’ As in, ‘What are you going to concentrate in?’ ” said Glasses. He slowly placed one red checker upon another red checker. This seemed to please him immensely.

  “Um, I don’t know. Maybe English,” said Penelope.

  “I have never heard that before,” said Ted.

  “English?” said Penelope.

  “Well, that is what it is called,” said Glasses. “It’s not called a major. It’s called a concentration. Personally, I think that terminology makes it much clearer.”

  “I agree,” said Nikil.

  “So I would say, ‘I am concentrating in English,’ when actually I am majoring in it?” said Penelope, feeling that awful giggle in the back of her throat.

  Nikil’s eyebrows arched downward, as if too exasperated to hold themselves in place.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Penelope. “OK, well, I’m gonna go. It was really nice meeting all of you. I just live upstairs so, you know, you can come up there anytime. I don’t have any checkers though, but ah, well, OK. Good-bye!” She left. Ted followed her.

  “Do you live on the third floor?” asked Penelope.

  “No,” said Ted. “I live in that room. Like I told you before.”

  “Oh,” said Penelope.

  They walked up the stairs in silence.

  “I think the panel is getting out soon,” said Ted.

  “Oh, do you? That’s good. I have yet to meet my roommates. Have you met them?”

  “What are their names?”

  “Lan and Emma.”

  “Nope,” said Ted. “There are some real winners here though.”

  “That’s good to know and, also, self-evident,” said Penelope. Fortunately they were practically at her room.

  “Thanks for walking me back,” said Penelope.

  “That’s OK,” said Ted.

  “OK, bye!” yelled Penelope as she darted into her suite and shut her door briskly behind her. It was the fifth-longest conversation she had ever had with a boy. She lay down on the futon with a pit in her stomach.

  Emma came back first. She was prettier than Penelope had thought she would be, in a pointy kind of way. Even her forehead came to a point in the middle of her head.

  “Hey, are you Penelope?” she asked Penelope, who was still lying prone on the futon. Penelope jumped up.

  “Oh, hi!” said Penelope. “Yes, that’s me. Are you Emma?”

  “Yes, hi.” She held out her hand and Penelope shook it. “How long have you been here?”

  “Oh, not long,” said Penelope. “I talked to some kids downstairs for a while. They’re a little weird.”

  “Oh,” said Emma. She put her bag down on the double. She was the Madeleine Albright owner.

  “How was the panel?”

  “The panel was really informative, actually. The application statistics were horrible, of course, but, I mean, when are they not?” Emma exploded into a hooting laugh. Penelope watched her in awe. She continued. “You know, I interned in a hospital for six summers, so I kind of get the whole culture of hospitals. It’s a very very intense work environment, which I would be totally fine with because that really fits my personality, but I think I’m just too compassionate for it. I feel other people’s pain a little too much, you know? I mean, I cry just thinking about hurting someone, and imagine if you had to cut someone open? I just can’t imagine doing it. I don’t really know how doctors go home every day and live with themselves, to be honest. So I don’t think I want to go to medical school, but I thought it was pretty important to check it out, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Penelope.

  “I just want to keep all my career options open at this point. In high school, I was involved in twelve extracurricular activities, all of which helped me explore my future. And it was this totally great experience. Fencing was really my first love—”

  “When did you get here?” Penelope blurted out.

  Emma blinked.

  “We got here yesterday. I stayed with my parents in the hotel and we moved in early this morning. You have to make the reservations like a year in advance, so the minute I got the letter last year my parents made a reservation at the Charles Hotel. They just left.”

  “Oh, cool,” said Penelope.

  “My father is going out of the country on business next week.”

  “Neat,” said Penelope.

  “He speaks fluent Russian. It really helps when you travel the world. Russian is a world language now, which is pretty amazing.”

  “That is amazing,” said Penelope. “Does he walk around in a fur hat in Moscow?”

  “No,” said Emma. “
He’s not even going to Moscow. He just knows Russian because he is a very erudite man.”

  “I have always wanted to wear one of those hats,” said Penelope.

  “Oh,” said Emma. She went into her room, which was also Penelope’s room. Penelope sat back down on the futon and kicked her foot against the floor a few times.

  “You’re from Connecticut, right?” said Emma from the bedroom. “I think I read that on your contact information.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Choate?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, like, did you go to Choate? As in Choate Rosemary Hall? I know some kids there.”

  “Um, no,” said Penelope.

  “Oh,” said Emma, who seemed disappointed.

  There was a pause.

  “Do you think you will miss your high school?” asked Penelope.

  “In what way?” said Emma, popping her head out of the bedroom.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Like your friends or something.”

  “I loved high school. It was really challenging. I mean literally, we had some of the brightest people in the country there. The math department taught college-level differential equations to sixth graders. We spent most of the day recreationally betting on the stock market.”

  “That sounds fun,” said Penelope.

  “So yes, I think I will miss it. But not as much as I will like it here.” Emma went back into their room and started to organize her part of the closet, which seemed to take up the entire closet.

  “Oh, me too,” said Penelope. “Have you met this Lan woman?”

  “Lan? Yeah, we said hi.”

  “What is she like?”

  “She’s nice,” said Emma. She closed the bedroom door. Penelope lay down on the futon again. She fell into an unsettling half sleep, while Emma jabbered on the phone in the next room. Penelope didn’t usually sleep with the lights on, but apparently Harvard made her have narcolepsy. She kept lapsing into a dream where a giant car seat was coming to eat her and all she could do was plead with it for mercy in Latin. Which was really weird because she didn’t even speak Latin.

  Penelope woke up with a start. A person who must have been Lan was hovering five inches from her face.

  By the time Penelope sat up, Lan already seemed bored with her discovery. Almost instantaneously, she seated herself on the windowsill and started to roll a cigarette.

  “Hey,” said Lan in a completely inflectionless voice. Long bangs obscured the top half of her face. She was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a decal of a snowman wearing sunglasses.

  “Hi,” said Penelope. “I’m Penelope.”

  “I know,” said Lan. She started to lick the paper of her rapidly forming cigarette and then paused. “Do you want one?” she said, gesturing to her creation.

  “No,” said Penelope. “I don’t smoke, but a lot of my friends do, ha.” That was a lie. None of Penelope’s friends did anything but occasionally miserably meet up at a local Chili’s.

  “OK. I wasn’t really going to give you one,” said Lan. She lit her cigarette and blew smoke out the window.

  “Did you go the panel?” asked Penelope.

  “Yeah,” said Lan.

  “Oh,” said Penelope. “Did you like it?”

  Lan was silent.

  “What did you do afterward?”

  “I watched a movie.”

  “Oh, that’s cool,” said Penelope.

  “Not really,” said Lan.

  “I guess not,” said Penelope. “Who did you see it with? Have you met anyone cute? Boys, I mean?” Penelope winced. Lan was silent again.

  “Um, what are you going to concentrate in?” asked Penelope.

  “Biomedical engineering,” said Lan.

  “That’s really cool. I can’t do anything with numbers, or engineering. I’m more of a language person myself, or maybe history, but I kind of hate history, so I don’t really know.”

  “How can you hate history?” said Lan, throwing her cigarette out the window.

  “I mean, I don’t hate the fact that there is history in the world. That would be stupid. But sometimes I think it’s kind of boring. I don’t know.”

  “OK, I’m going to bed,” said Lan, and stalked into her room.

  Penelope was alone in the common room. She immediately fell asleep on the futon.

  2.

  An Ice Cream Social

  The day of the placement exam, Penelope woke up with a stiff neck. At first she forgot she was at Harvard. Then she remembered.

  Penelope had a full day ahead. She had a placement test, a proctor meeting, and an ice cream social. Even though these activities seemed to be conceived with an immature seventh grader in mind, she was glad of their existence. She had spent the last couple of days watching Oprah while everyone else studied for the placement exam, and it was getting very emotionally tiring.

  Penelope padded over to the bathroom to take a shower. Emma was gone and her bed was immaculately made. Lan’s room was dark and locked shut. Penelope thought she smelled pot emanating from under the door. She knocked.

  “Hey, do you want to get breakfast?” she asked through the door. There was no answer. “OK, you don’t have to.”

  Penelope showered. She put on her favorite jeans and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She partially blow-dried her hair, braided it, and went to breakfast.

  Annenberg Hall, where breakfast was served, was a gigantic Victorian gothic structure tempered only by the tenets of Christian Science from reaching true Harry Potter levels of grandiosity. The ceilings were cavernous. The stained-glass windows depicted Christopher Columbus and various Greeks. Marble busts of forgotten governors of Massachusetts decorated the walls. Breakfast didn’t really deserve this building. The breakfast offered—a cold, cheerless affair involving fried chicken—definitely suffered for the comparison.

  Penelope saw Emma right away. She was sitting at a long table in the corner, animatedly talking to four other girls. All the girls were wearing pastel iterations of the same jacket, which looked like it was originally made for fox hunting. Penelope scanned the room. There was Emma, and then there were miles and miles of sparsely populated tables. She decided to sit down with Emma and be friendly.

  “Hey, can I sit here?” asked Penelope.

  “Oh,” said Emma, “we were just leaving.” The girls nodded in agreement. “We have to study for the placement exam.”

  “Isn’t that exam just to test out what you know, so they can put you in the right class?”

  “But don’t you want to be in the highest class possible? I mean, I am at least going to try to get into Math 55.”

  “What is Math 55?” asked Penelope.

  “It’s the hardest math class! It’s actually the hardest math class in the world. It takes geniuses like eight hours to do the problem sets. You’re so funny. Anyway, we have to go,” she said, and left. The gaggle of girls traipsed out behind her.

  Penelope sat down at the deserted table. She toyed with her fried chicken, which she now realized was stuffed with broccoli. She looked around the dining hall. Everyone had their old calculus books out to study for the math placement exam. Penelope started eating her chicken very quickly.

  Then Ted sat down next to her.

  “Oh, hi,” said Penelope.

  “Oh, hi,” said Ted. “Were those girls your roommates?”

  “One was,” said Penelope. “They had to go. Why aren’t you sitting with your roommates?”

  “Because they are studying for the math placement exam and leaving messages on random girls’ Facebook walls.”

  “Why aren’t you doing that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ted. He eyed the broccoli stuffing suspiciously. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Shoot,” said Penelope, who winced again.

  “I do not understand why everyone is going insane over the math placement exam. School hasn’t even started yet. Math 55 sounds like hell on earth.”

  “
I know, seriously. It’s weird,” said Penelope. She felt relieved all of a sudden.

  “The ice cream social actually sounds fun in comparison.”

  “That is when you know things are bad,” said Penelope.

  “How is this fried chicken? It looks amazing,” said Ted.

  “It is,” said Penelope. She picked up a glob of broccoli stuffing and zestfully shoved it in her mouth. Obviously, she had to go.

  “Well, it has been fun, Ted,” she said.

  “Where are you going? Not you too. Are you really going to study for the math placement exam right now?”

  “Um, no. But I have to get ready and everything. I need to get a ruler.”

  “What? Why?” said Ted.

  “Oh, ha ha. Maybe not a ruler,” said Penelope, realizing that she had never used a ruler during a math test. “Well, anyway, I have to go.”

  “OK,” said Ted.

  Penelope stood up and started to gather her tray. She felt bad about how abrupt she was being, but she also felt that if she prolonged the encounter unnecessarily, she would make some horrible gaffe, like talking about Charles Dickens’s penchant for spiritualism, which was something she discussed in the longest conversation she ever had with a boy. She wanted to be nice to Ted because he was being nice to her. He was sort of good-looking too, like a Roman senator who was sensitive and unused to fighting in wars.

  “So are you coming to the proctor meeting?” she asked, sitting down again. Ted looked confused.

  “Well, it is mandatory, so I guess so. I don’t know why they call them proctors. They are mostly just grad students who live in the dorm.”

  “Oh, me too,” said Penelope.

  “What?” said Ted. “Well, I’ll see you at the meeting.”

  “Definitely,” said Penelope. She picked up her tray and stood up. As she walked out, she hit her leg on the side of the table and stumbled, almost spilling broccoli and chicken bones everywhere.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  The placement exam went relatively well. In the middle of it, Penelope forgot calculus, but she figured she could always take Counting People for her math credit if all else failed. She had seen this class in the course book and thought it sounded interesting. Counting was something she was excellent at.